Google Rolls Out Online Storage Services

An anonymous reader writes "The associated press reports that Google is slated to provide online storage at a price. From the article: 'Web search and Internet services company Google Inc. on Friday began selling expanded online storage, targeted for users with large picture, music or video file collections. The prices range from $20 per year for 6 gigabytes of online storage; $75 per year for 25 gigabytes of storage; $250 per year for 100 gigabytes of storage; and $500 per year for 250 gigabytes of storage.' Is this too expensive for what there offering, or are you going to make use of it?"

Not quite GDrive, or even S3...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's cheaper than Amazon's S3 once you factor in bandwidth, but all this really is is supplemental storage for GMail and Picasa. You'd need something hackish like GMail Drive to use it for anything more. Give me FTP, HTTP, SFTP, etc, access and then we'll talk.

Re:Yes, it's too expensive

[thornomad]

Apple's .Mac gives you 10GB for $99 per year -- and I think there are quite a few people who have signed on (mostly because it says "Mac" somewhere in the URL) despite the high price and poor service (IMO). I think the same will happen with Google (with or without the poor service).

Re:So this was their plan all along

[glop]

You can already pay with PicasaWeb. That allows you to have more that 1GB. The 1GB option will likely stay free as a way to attract customers.

Definitely too expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a customer a PowWeb, and for $5.77/mo I get:
# 300 GB Disk Space
# 3000 GB/mo Bandwidth
# FREE Domain Name
# Unlimited Mailboxes
# 75 MySQL Databases
# Host UNLIMITED Domains

Yes, it sounds like an ad, but no, it isn't meant to be... I was lazy and copied their site for what I get.

Sure, I don't get shell access, which sucks... but what do you expect for under $6/mo? It's plenty fine for my image galleries of hi-res images (they have an installer for Gallery also).

-RC

Re:Applications: Trickle backup

[verbila]

Mozy does this (http://www.mozypro.com/mozy_pro/comparison/), and they just started supporting Macs in addition to PCs. Great service. Simple, hassle-free, encrypted. No, I don't work for them. Just a satisfied user. They have a free version of their service, too (2Gb).

Re:Old new: It's called gmail

[dj_tla]

Yeah, that's actually what the storage is for. From the article:

"the storage can be used across several Google products, including photo site Picasa; Gmail, a Google email application; and Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Google's office applications."

Gmail users can purchase it by going to Settings (top right of the gmail interface), then Accounts, then check out the new "Add additional storage" row. Or, you can just straight to https://www.google.com/accounts/PurchaseStorage [google.com]

Official post and links

[FleaPlus]

The Forbes article didn't link to it, so here's the official announcement from Google:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/08/simple-way- to-get-more-storage.html [blogspot.com]

Also, here's the link for actually purchasing the additional space:

https://www.google.com/accounts/PurchaseStorage [google.com]

At the time being, this doesn't seem to be a standalone storage service (the summary was kind of ambiguous about this), but rather a way to upgrade the space you have on additional Google services (gmail, Picasa, etc.). In any case, I'd really love it if they eventually came out with a storage service that you could use as a CVS/SVN repository.

Re:there

[Zontar_Thing_From_Ve]

Sigh.

Here we go again, wielding the language of Shakespeare with all the delicate sensitivity and purpose of a surgeon wielding a cosh.

Sigh.

Here we go again. Another Brit using British slang and just expecting the rest of the world to understand. I had to go to dictionary.com, but for those of us who aren't Brits
cosh = bludgeon

Use encryption

[joggle]

You could, you know, encrypt your data using something like PGP [pgp.com]. There's also an older free version of PGP here [pgpi.org].

Re:Amazon S3

[crt]

I think you mean Jungle Disk [jungledisk.com], which allows you to connect to Amazon S3 from your desktop, as well as do automatic backup.

At $0.15/gb/month, S3 is already priced better than Google - especially considering you only pay for what you use with no need to pre-pay for a bunch of storage in advance.

S3 is really a different service - you can store anything on it, whereas the Google storage can apparently only be used from Google apps (for now). The other advantage of using software like Jungle Disk with S3 is that your data is encrypted before even leaving your machine, and neither Amazon nor anyone else can access it.

Forbes blew it -- Not an online storage service

[SEE]

All this is is an opportunity to buy extra space for GMail/Picassa/etc. beyond what you already get on their servers for free. It is not an online storage service like Xdrive [xdrive.com], but an equivalent to buying Hotmail Plus [live.com].

Re:Can I use it to increase Gmail's capacity?

[jkiol]

http://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/answer. py?answer=65430 [google.com]

Re:Amazon S3

[yelvington]

S3Fox:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/324 7 [mozilla.org]
Integrates an upload/download interface for Amazon S3 into Firefox. Very slick and very free.

To provide actual data...

[Blakey Rat]

Currently, I get a little over 250 GB from Dreamhost and I'm paying $120 a year for it. I've been a Dreamhost customer for a couple years, so I'm not sure how much a new customer gets (Dreamhost increases the storage each week), but I'm sure it's less expensive than Google's rates. I have 199 GB uploaded at the moment, which is a near-100% backup of my DVD collection (in 1-gig-per-movie MP4 format.) Dreamhost supports mounting storage as WebDAV, FTP, or rsync to transfer files. (And of course there's web hosting included.)

The problem with large amounts of storage isn't the amount of space, but the time taken to upload. It took a week to upload my movie files to Dreamhost on a medium-speed DSL connection, and it would take several solid days of downloading to get it back.

Re:Yes, it's too expensive

[eclectic4]

Holy bejeesus, I can't believe you got modded up for that completely misleading comment. It's not $99 just for storage, it's also email, one-click publishing of web pages and photo pages. Groups. Automatic calander, bookmark, address book, email and some third party syncing. Easy Mac and PC (and Web) access to upload and download from anywhere, video tutorials, backup application, etc... the list is very long.

Check it out [apple.com].

I use it every day and love it. I have found no better coupling than iLife and .Mac. It just works.

Horriblely Written Article

[smitth1276]

They used more words, and described what Google is doing less effectively. From Google's official blog:

When you reach the limit of free storage (i.e., 1GB for Picasa Web Albums, 2.8GB for Gmail), consider this your overflow solution. Plans start at $20/year for 6GB (yes, $5 cheaper than before), with larger plans ranging up to 250GB.

When you go to the official storage management page [google.com], the first thing it says is, "Each Google service offers you some free storage.", and then gives you a nice visual representation of how much you have used.

Re:Yes, it's too expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

Ummm, no. It uses WebDAV. You can access it from any OS that supports WebDAV.

If it's just the space, you can get more, cheaper.

[mxs]

Let's knock out the obvious ones first, shall we ?

http://www.megaupload.com/ [megaupload.com] has one offering, 250gbyte. Prepaid for one year it's 50 Euros (or whatever their site says for the US locale). That's 70 bucks. You /can/ use this as a storage-only service, but of course you can also use it for distribution and such -- no transfer limits. Rapidshare.com has similar offerings (with "unlimited" storage but a 5gbyte/day cap) at similar prices. Both of these rely heavily on customers infringing copyrights, so it's anyone's guess how long they'll stay around. Both also use somewhat nonstandard file deposit and file delivery methods. There are countless others in that market (oxedion, mediafire, upfile, rs.de, filefront, etc., all with varying foci).

The regular webhosting market has things like this to offer as well. http://www.dreamhost.com/ [dreamhost.com] : The cheapest plan, at one year prepayment, would be around 120 bucks and offer 145gb of space. I say would since you can use their promo codes (check the forums) to almost triple the space or drop the price to a lot less. So that's 400 gb of storage, a couple terabytes of transfer a month, and some processing power to boot (WebDAV/FTP/SFTP/SCP/rsync/etc. are all possible). I imagine competitors to DH will have similar offerings space-wise. We're looking at around a fourth the price for almost double the storage space. Don't you dare yell "overselling" -- Google does, too.

If you can be bothered with some cumbersome setup (to laypeople, anyway), Amazon S3 will get you storage space for $0.15/gb/month, plus traffic ($0.18/gb). If you actually use 250gb, the price will be comparable to Google for storage alone (i.e. no transfers other than the initial incoming transfer); the difference is that you get charged by the byte, not in large pre-paid packages. If you use 1gb and transfer it twice, you pay $0.51 that month. Also consider that if you use less than the 250gb Google offering, you're probably get away cheaper (since the smaller Google plans are comparatively more expensive while Amazon's offering exhibits a linear price curve over the amount of storage used).

The value Google's space has is probably the integration with its applications -- Picasa, for instance, lacks decent online functionality using standard protocols -- and Google will probably deliver GREAT online functionality with their own service.

If all you really need is a foolproof backup, open up an FTP and let the world mirror it. I wonder who would do such a thing ...